{"id":279,"date":"2005-08-26T23:45:39","date_gmt":"2005-08-27T04:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=279"},"modified":"2010-12-05T22:14:23","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T03:14:23","slug":"war-powers-war-lies-part-8-playbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=279","title":{"rendered":"War Powers, War Lies: Part 8: Playbook"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0 Next Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/address>\n
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War Powers, War Lies: A Series<\/h2>\n

Part 8: Playbook<\/h2>\n

Published in the Maryland Daily Record August 26, 2005<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Last time<\/a>, we considered the way the Bush Administration lawyers rearticulated Presidential war powers to enable U.S. forces to capture Muslim men around the world and hold them incommunicado, potentially forever.\u00a0 We reviewed how this \u201cnew paradigm\u201d did not pass muster with the Geneva Conventions or customary international humanitarian law.\u00a0 What we did not address was why.\u00a0 What motivated the President\u2019s men to adopt this risky and illegal course?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The official rationale was that the detainees were enemy combatants.\u00a0 The evidence is overwhelming that this was often false, and that the U.S. knew it.\u00a0 The dragnets that had netted our captives were indiscriminate.\u00a0 In Afghanistan, our untrustworthy Northern Alliance allies would inform on their rivals, and we would seize them without investigation, often without taking statements from the accusers we could later use.\u00a0 In Iraq, we followed extremely messy \u201ccordon and capture\u201d tactics bereft of quality control.[1]\u00a0 (Coalition military intelligence officers later admitted to the International Committee of the Red Cross that between 70% and 90% of the Iraqi detainees had been arrested \u201cby mistake.\u201d)[2]\u00a0 Consequently, as Eric Saar\u2019s 2005 book about his experiences as a translator at Guantanamo, Inside the Wire<\/em>, makes clear, many of the captives on his watch there were understandably accused of nothing by their captors.\u00a0 The White House in truth was not so concerned about keeping illegal combatants out of circulation; its main motive was a quest for \u201cActionable Intelligence,\u201d meaning under present circumstances advance knowledge of where the next Al Quaeda or Iraqi insurgent blow would fall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Occasionally interrogating Muslim captives did lead to Actionable Intelligence.\u00a0 The May 8, 2002 capture of Jose Padilla, accused of being sent to the U.S. to deploy a \u201cdirty bomb,\u201d was reportedly the result of such questioning.\u00a0 (Whether this was actually Padilla\u2019s objective remains undetermined, but his arrest, a form of \u201cAction,\u201d could at least be credited to interrogation intelligence.)\u00a0 Other intelligence coups may well be unreported.\u00a0 But mostly the information obtained was trash.\u00a0 Alarmed, the Bush Administration dispatched a CIA analyst to Guantanamo in the Fall of 2002.\u00a0 As Seymour Hersh reported,[3] the analyst concluded that more than half the detainees did not belong there.\u00a0 They were neither jihadis nor possessed of Actionable Intelligence.\u00a0 Rather than accept that it had been barking up the wrong tree, the Bush Administration decided to fix the problem by intensifying the interrogations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Administration already had legal clearance.\u00a0 Marking out the contours of torture like the boundaries of a minefield, we were deemed free to do everything else, no matter how inimical to American values or international standards, to force our captives to talk.\u00a0 The key rationalizing came from Jay Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel (since rewarded by being elevated to the 11th<\/sup> Circuit bench).\u00a0 In a lengthy August 1, 2002 memo to Presidential Counsel (now Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales — a memo which the Administration refused either to classify or to make available to Congress<\/a>, although leaks unmasked it — Bybee parsed out the definition of torture so it consisted of very little.\u00a0 It was not merely a matter of inflicting pain or discomfort or mental anguish to make someone talk; it had to be pain of a \u201clevel that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions.\u201d\u00a0 That memorable phrase had been wrenched out of context from statutes defining pain whose emergency palliation Medicare reimburses.[4]\u00a0 But there is a world of difference between policies about pain we pay to alleviate and policies about pain we choose to inflict.\u00a0 The moral implications are quite distinct.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, precisely because of its moral aspect, recognizing torture is like recognizing pornography.\u00a0 To paraphrase Justice Stewart, we know it when we see it.\u00a0 And torture we know by the line from a thousand old war movies: We Have Ways of Making You Talk.\u00a0 Any pain, discomfort, mental anguish, or threat of the above, inflicted to force talk from a prisoner who wishes not to talk — that\u2019s torture, and we all know it, and shame on anyone who says otherwise.\u00a0 It has nothing to do with whether it makes the prisoner feel as if his kidneys are failing, or whether statute or treaty has described the exact way the anguish was inflicted.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And every time, despite Bybee\u2019s (dare we say it?) painstaking and tortured analysis, Bybee nearly found himself acknowledging this plain truth, he escaped by playing his trump card: Presidential warmaking power, the Bush lawyers\u2019 talisman.\u00a0 Torture, it seems, is a right constitutionally guaranteed our President in his role as Commander in Chief, in charge of our Nation\u2019s defense.\u00a0 Bybee commented that torture of individuals possessing foreknowledge of imminent attacks \u201cwould be justified under the doctrine of self-defense.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIf hurting [the prisoner] is the only means to prevent the death or injury of others put at risk by [actions of co-conspirators], such torture should be permissible, and on the same basis that self-defense is permissible.\u201d[5]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In other words, the Jack Bauer justification. \u00a0For readers living under a rock the last few years, Jack Bauer, the hero of Fox Network\u2019s 24<\/em>, repeatedly tortures people \u2013 mainly but not all bad guys\u00a0\u2013 to elicit information utterly crucial to heading off imminent national catastrophe, the Holy Grail of Actionable Intel.\u00a0 But at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, there have apparently been few Holy Grails.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bybee distinguished from torture lesser forms of pressure called \u201ccruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.\u201d\u00a0 And there you had Bybee\u2019s argument in essence: torture would of course be wrong, but hooray for that cruel, inhuman and degrading stuff.\u00a0 Unless, of course, we got up that particular morning feeling like Jack Bauer confronting an emergency, in which case the torture was fine too.\u00a0 Official U.S. policy (though concealed from the U.S. citizenry).<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There followed a lot of memo chatter among military lawyers trying to put this singular distinction into practice.\u00a0 And at some point Bybee added a second memorandum on specific practices, and soon-to-be federal judge and then Homeland Defense Secretary Michael Chertoff briefed the CIA on what coercive interrogation it could perpetrate<\/a>. (The Administration is still successfully hiding the second Bybee and the Chertoff memos from us.)\u00a0 Amongst these memos, there developed a playbook of permitted practices.\u00a0 The playbook is not possible to summarize precisely, and it is not terribly important to do so, because the metaphysical lawyers\u2019 line between Torture and Not Torture was probably never seriously meant to be observed.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And even if the lawyers were serious, the evidence suggests Secretary Rumsfeld and his people never meant to play along.\u00a0 Rumsfeld was upset with the lawyers\u2019 interference anyhow.\u00a0 On ten occasions in the two months after 9\/11, military lawyers had withheld approval of strikes on senior Al Quaeda and Taliban officials so long that by the time approval was received, the targets had moved out of range.\u00a0 At this point, as Seymour Hersh reports, friendly foreign intelligence services were reporting to us intelligence they had obtained with torture.\u00a0 A former official told Hersh that they \u201cwould tell us, We pulled out teeth and fingers from a prisoner, but we got some good shit.\u00a0 He\u2019s dead now, but we don\u2019t care.\u201d[6]\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hence Rumsfeld insisted upon and received a so-called special-access program.\u00a0 It was comprised of special operations personnel from the Army and Navy, and CIA officers, and shadowy civilian contractors.\u00a0 They were given a \u201cblack budget\u201d and operated almost without accountability — a fortiori<\/em> without accountability to the lawyers.\u00a0 According to Hersh, the SAP \u201cwas given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets.\u201d\u00a0 This program, among other accomplishments, organized Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The key organizers, it appears, were Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone (who brought the SAP into the Iraqi prisons), Lt. Gen. William Boykin (notorious for a speech in which he equated the Muslim world with Satan), and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller (in charge of the interrogation program first at Guantanamo and then at Abu Ghraib).\u00a0 The world largely came to know their handiwork from photos sampled on Sixty Minutes II<\/em> on April 28, 2004.\u00a0 As horrifying as the photos looked \u2013 hooded men, men being sexually humiliated in a myriad of fashions, men being terrorized by dogs \u2013 they seemed to be approximating, in a rough way, what Bybee had described in his 2002 memo: cruel, inhuman, and degrading, but probably not inflictive of \u201csevere pain.\u201d\u00a0 Later, we learned of more Jack Bauer-ish behavior: detainees beaten to death, held immobile for hours in the hot sun, stripped and placed in freezing environments, raped, subjected to extreme sleep deprivation and prolonged loud noise, threatened with death by interrogators pointing guns at them, actually shot in non-lethal places, subjected to electric shocks, hung up for hours in excruciating pain.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But apparently the SAP brain trust were particularly taken with the very techniques practiced in Abu Ghraib Tier I-A where the notorious photos were shot, and at Guantanamo in Eric Saar\u2019s presence: sacrilege and sexual humiliation. When the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in February 2004 on our various Iraqi detention centers, they noted that at all of them, there seemed to be a single playbook \u2013 the real<\/em> playbook \u2013 of practices focusing on the sexual and religious humiliation of those detainees deemed \u201chigh value,\u201d i.e. most likely to yield Actionable Intel.\u00a0 This perverse playbook seems to have been shaped largely in response to a 1973 book, The Arab Mind<\/a><\/em>, reportedly widely circulated in U.S. conservative, military, and expatriate circles before the Iraq invasion.[7] Its author, Raphael Patai, emphasized Arab sexual taboos and fear of humiliation.\u00a0 Apparently, therefore, sexual humiliation was felt by General Miller and his people to be key to overcoming resistance; hence the forced masturbation, the sexual displays, the adorning of male detainees with female underwear.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones\u2019 August 23, 2004 internal report cleared General Miller from blame for anything worse than negligence in having allowed these excesses.\u00a0 However, under the heading of \u201cCoincidence? I think not,\u201d compare the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo on General Miller\u2019s watch personally witnessed by Eric Saar, right down to the sexual humiliation element, to the treatment of the Abu Ghraib detainees once Miller took charge there (marked by a prolonged early September 2003 visit).[8]\u00a0 The classic note is sounded in Saar\u2019s account of a female interrogator pretending to sprinkle a detainee\u2019s face with her own menstrual blood to force him to reveal his reasons for attending an American flight school.\u00a0 This playbook traveled with Miller.\u00a0 The conclusion is obvious.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The official stance now seems to be that we never tortured (except for a few rogue MPs) and now we\u2019re going to stop.\u00a0 None of this is credible, though it would make sense from a strictly tactical viewpoint not to bother with pursuing unreliable or nugatory intelligence through torture.\u00a0 (When Mohammed al-Qahtani admitted under CIA torture that he had been intended to be the 20th<\/sup> 9\/11 hijacker<\/a>, an instance cited by those who think torture sometimes yields Actionable Intel, he was in fact only telling interrogators what they already knew from other sources<\/a>.)\u00a0 The fact is, we\u2019re not stopping.\u00a0 The British paper the Guardian reported in December<\/a> that torture continues at Guantanamo, and the Washington Post reported in January<\/a> that the only change in the Iraqi torture situation since Abu Ghraib is that we have largely turned the job over to the Iraqis — and not just any Iraqis, but specifically the very men who used to perform that function for Saddam Hussein.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Torture has not made us demonstrably safer.\u00a0 In Iraq the Jack Bauer justification might apply if torture were leading to us stopping the bombings of our forces.\u00a0 It\u2019s not; from August 1 through August 11, the date of this writing, 46 U.S. armed forces members have been killed, the majority by bombings, a rate of 4.18 a day.[9]\u00a0 The Jack Bauer test might even be met if torture had led to the capture of Osama bin Laden, but it hasn\u2019t.\u00a0 Torture failed to prevent the London subway bombings.\u00a0 If there is any convincing evidence that torture has stopped even one imminent Al Quaeda atrocity, the government has not shared it.\u00a0 Torture is<\/em> the atrocity.\u00a0 We should never have arrogated it to our war powers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0\u00a0 Mark Danner, Torture and Truth (2004)<\/a><\/em> at 30-31.<\/p>\n

\u00a0[2]\u00a0\u00a0 Danner at 257.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command (2004)<\/a><\/em> at 2.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0\u00a0 Danner at 119-20.\u00a0 See, e.g. 42 U.S.C. \u00a7 1395w-22<\/a>, x, dd.\u00a0 (The language of the statute may have been slightly changed in the interim.<\/p>\n

\u00a0[5]\u00a0\u00a0 Danneker at 153-54, quoting S. Moore, Torture and the Balance of Evils, 23 Israel L.Rev. 280, 323 (1989), which Bybee claims summarizes the belief of \u201cleading scholarly commentators.\u201d<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0\u00a0 Chain of Command at 48.<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0\u00a0 In fairness, as http:\/\/www.meforum.org\/article\/636<\/a> comments, Hersh\u2019s authority for the circulation of the book is thin.\u00a0 But at least we have, as this website establishes, Norvell B. deAtkine\u2019s introduction to a recent reprint, along with word that deAtkine assigned the book in training Green Berets at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School.\u00a0 See also http:\/\/slate.msn.com\/id\/2101328<\/a> , viewed 8\/15\/05.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0[8] \u00a0The Army\u2019s 2004 Fay-Jones Report <\/a>\u00a0at 57 et seq.<\/p>\n

\u00a0[9] \u00a0\u00a0See generally http:\/\/icasualties.org\/<\/a> .<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

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When the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in February 2004 on our various Iraqi detention centers, they noted that at all of them, there seemed to be a single playbook \u2013 the real playbook \u2013 of practices focusing on the sexual and religious humiliation of those detainees deemed \u201chigh value,\u201d i.e. most likely to yield Actionable Intel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1672,1681,844,199,1670,585,845,1700,1685,1663,660,1639,577,866,1668,1624,1671,1666,1669,1680,687,575,5,1682,1619,1665,70,1637,662,1478,1679,193,1705,746,1675,1678,1701,1692,1694,1695,668,1673,1683,1702,1686,1667,1704,189,594,1674,1684,1676,1664,1699,1689,1638,1696,1687,1688,1690,593,1698,1703,1697,19,1660,1691,1677,1693],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-11th-circuit-u-s-court-of-appeals","tag-24-24-program","tag-844","tag-abu-ghraib","tag-actional-intelligence","tag-afghanistan","tag-al-quaeda","tag-anthony-jones","tag-army","tag-bush-administration-lawyers","tag-central-intelligence-agency","tag-chain-of-command","tag-cia","tag-combatants","tag-cordon-and-capture","tag-detention","tag-dirty-bomb","tag-enemy-combatants","tag-eric-saar","tag-fox-network","tag-geoffrey-miller","tag-green-berets","tag-guantanamo","tag-holy-grail","tag-icrc","tag-incommunicado","tag-indefinite-detention","tag-inside-the-wire","tag-international-committee-of-the-red-cross","tag-iraq","tag-jack-bauer","tag-jay-bybee","tag-john-f-kennedy-special-warfare-school","tag-jose-padilla","tag-justice-potter-stewart","tag-kidney-failure","tag-lt-gen-anthony-jones","tag-lt-gen-william-boykin","tag-maj-gen-geoffrey-miller","tag-major-general-geoffrey-miller","tag-mark-danner","tag-medicare-reimbursement","tag-michael-chertoff","tag-mohammed-al-qahtani","tag-navy","tag-northern-alliance","tag-norvell-b-deatkine","tag-office-of-legal-counsel","tag-osama-bin-laden","tag-palliation","tag-playbook","tag-pornography","tag-presidential-war-powers","tag-raphael-patai","tag-sap","tag-seymour-hersh","tag-sixty-minutes-ii","tag-special-operations","tag-special-access-program","tag-stphnen-cambone","tag-taliban","tag-the-arab-mind","tag-the-guardian","tag-tier-i-a","tag-torture","tag-torture-and-truth","tag-undersecretary-of-defense-stephen-cambone","tag-we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk","tag-william-boykin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1596,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions\/1596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}